


Why did you leave me?

by flowing_river



Series: Why did you leave me? [2]
Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: A bit of comfort at the end, Abandonment Issues, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Drinking, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Loneliness, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Whump, for most of the story, only a bit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:28:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22886335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowing_river/pseuds/flowing_river
Summary: Prequel to "We should Have Noticed"*Spoilers for season 4 in the summary*After Phoenix disbands, Mac is all alone. And no one comes to save him when he gets into some trouble...
Relationships: Jack Dalton & Angus MacGyver (MacGyver TV 2016)
Series: Why did you leave me? [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1645099
Comments: 18
Kudos: 93





	Why did you leave me?

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for season 4 (only episode 1) in this fic!! Also be sure to read "We should Have Noticed" before reading this...
> 
> Also feel free to check out the lovely @thethistlegirl (N1ghtshade on A03)'s art: https://thethistlegirl.tumblr.com/post/610966237804167168/why-did-you-leave-me-flowingriver-macgyver

Pain. That’s all Mac knew now, pain. Every part of him hurt and he was covered in bruises, cuts and burns. He was not looking forward to the sound of footsteps which indicated more and more pain to come.

He has a plan, not a very good one, but at least something. Hopefully the small nail he found will be enough to help him escape because he knows it’s been weeks since he’s been here and he knows that the team, well former team, will probably not be able to find him at this point.

Finally, the time has come when Mac knows that the guards go out to switch with the next rotation and Mac knows that this might be his last chance to escape. He’s growing weaker every day and he doesn’t know how much longer he can last.

Mac manages to unlock his handcuffs and the door. He hasn’t stumbled upon anything to use as a makeshift weapon and he feels so defenseless, but he has no choice but to limp through the hallways hoping that no one sees him because he knows he’ll be done for then.

He manages to make it outside without any incident and looks around to try and find out where he is. He doesn’t recognize where he is, so he limps along the abandoned road trying to find someone or something to help him.

He stumbles and falls on the side of the road, groaning when all his wounds erupt in pain. He tries to get up, but he’s too weak and everything hurts. He wants Jack. If Jack was here, he would have kept Mac going and gotten him to safety, even if it required Jack carrying him to the nearest hospital.

He doesn’t even realize that tears are running down his face at the thought of Jack and he doesn’t even have the energy to lift his hand to wipe them away.

_Jack, please come save me. Please…_

  
  


Jack doesn’t come for him. Instead Mac continues lying there, silently sobbing and lacking the energy to get up and move. He must’ve passed out at some point because the next thing he knows, a lady is standing over him. 

She’s panicking and saying that she called an ambulance that should be there soon, he just needs to hold on.

It doesn’t take long for the sounds of a siren to get to him and then everything is just a flash of bright lights and people yelling about his wounds and blood loss. 

Someone’s frantically talking to him, but he doesn’t know what’s happening, he just wants it to stop, he wants to go home, he wants Jack.

“Sir, sir.” someone yells, “We need to operate on you. Do you consent?”

Mac blinks as he processes the information and then manages a nod. Everything goes hazy after that and then goes black…

When he wakes up again, he’s alone. He’s lying on a hospital bed in a small room, hooked up to various machines. He looks around and tries to move, stopping when the movement pulls on his stitches.

_Stitches?_

Mac lifts the edge of the blanket covering him and pulls aside his hospital gown to look at the bandages covering him. He sighs letting the blanket drop, looking up when a man walks inside.

“Good evening Mr. MacGyver. How are you feeling?”

“Call me Mac. And I’m fine.”

“Good. How’s your pain?”

“It’s fine.”

“Good. If you need anything, just push the call button.”

“Um, could I make a few phone calls?”

“Of course! You can use the phone on your table. The police will come by later on, they have some questions about what happened.”

“Thank you,” he says.

The man smiles at him before walking back out.

Mac grabbed the phone and decides to call Matty first. He knows that she must be worried about him being gone.

The phone rings for some time before Matty picks up.

“Hello?” she asks.

“Hey Matty,” Mac says.

“Blondie! I haven’t heard from you for a while. What have you been up to?”

Mac freezes, _is she playing some sort of trick on me?_

“Mac? You still there?”

“Yeah, I’m still here. I haven’t been doing much,” he says, wincing when some of his wounds flare up in pain.

“I’m sorry Mac, I’m really busy. I’ll call you back, later.”

“Oh, of course. That’s fine.”

They said their goodbyes before Matty hung up.

Mac dials Bozer’s number next with shaking hands.

“Hello?” Bozer answers.

“Hey, Boze.”

“Mac! I’m glad to hear from you, but I’m really busy, I’ll call back later okay?”

“Uh sure. That’s fine.”

“That’s great,” Bozer says before hanging up.

_They have to have known. There’s no way they couldn’t have noticed._

He calls Riley next. She picks up and mentions she’s exhausted from a long day at work, so he ends the call.

He drops the phone and sobs, covering his face with his hands.

_How did they not notice? I must mean so little to them that they can’t even notice that I was missing for weeks._

He can’t stop sobbing despite the fact that his hitching breath is pulling on all his stitches and everything hurts.

The machines around him are beeping loudly and several people rush in, there’s yelling and a small prick and everything goes dark.

* * *

Mac wakes up slowly. The police come by to question him and he tells him everything he knows, which isn’t much.

He’s embarrassed by the fact that he breaks down sobbing when they tell him that no one even reported him missing, so no one had even been looking for him. They have to calm him down before they finish their questions and leave.

He gets himself discharged from the hospital, against the doctor’s advice.

He hates hospitals and knows he won’t be able to stay here alone. Not without someone to sit by the bed to help him through his nightmares and make sure he doesn’t lie there in silence. He hates the silence the most.

He goes home and ignores the mess everywhere throughout his house, mostly from the fight he had when he was overpowered in his own house.

He goes to his door and updates his security system first, making it almost impossible for anyone to get inside without him knowing about it. Then he stops by the fridge and grabs an old beer that’s been in there and opens it and makes it to the couch.

He drowns the bottle quickly and puts the empty bottle aside. He finds his phone, still sitting on the table and turns it on to see all the missed calls and messages from the manager at repair shop he works at.

_Worked at_ , he corrects himself after noticing the message that said he was fired for not showing up for so long.

_At least someone noticed that I was gone._

It hurts that someone he worked for, for barely 2 weeks noticed he was gone and the people who should’ve had his back didn’t.

He turns on the TV to try to distract himself from his thoughts, but it doesn’t work. He can’t stop thinking about how they all left him after all the times they swore they would be there for him.

He had started believing that it might have been true, but he should have known it was too good to be true. They left him, all of them. Even Jack…

* * *

Mac doesn’t even realize he’s drifted off on the couch until he wakes up screaming. The images of being held down while a man runs a knife all over him still linger in his mind as he tries to catch his breath.

It doesn’t help that every breath he takes pulls on all of his stitches that cover his torso, arms, and legs. Everything hurts and he lets the pain distract him from all the images in his mind.

It doesn’t work, so Mac gets up, sighing, and finds a bottle of regular pain medications and takes a dose. He knows it won’t do much, but he doesn’t want to take his prescription painkillers. That just means more nightmares he can’t get out of.

He checks the time, it’s only 2am. He knows he won’t be able to go back to sleep, so he finds his computer and starts looking for jobs. He knows he’ll be lucky to find one where he can work without aggregating his injuries.

He doesn’t have any experience he can use, his army background would only get him jobs in security, or the government and his injuries prevented him from taking those jobs. Everything he did with Phoenix, even the Think Tank part were classified, and he only had a honorary degree.

While doing his research he stumbles upon a teaching certificate he had completed once for an undercover job. He didn’t really need to finish a certificate, but he had wanted to finish one. 

He loves teaching people and if he didn’t work for Phoenix after coming back from the army, he would have finished college and gotten a teaching job.

That seems like the perfect thing for him to do, he wouldn’t need to move around much and he would be surrounded by people all day. 

He is so lonely, he just wanted someone to talk to, even if it was just about science. And being around so many people would make the chances of him getting kidnapped again slimmer. And even if he did get kidnapped, someone would notice. He hopes.

He finds someplace which was hiring and started filling out the application. He must have fallen asleep while filling out the forms because the next thing he knew, he is sitting up, barely stopping himself from screaming.

Mac groans as his injuries protest at his sudden movements. He feels the familiar feeling of his stitches breaking, so he grabs a first aid kit and goes to the bathroom. 

He pulls off his shirt to see one of the larger cuts on the side of his stomach’s stitches have broken. He has a kit to stitch up his wounds, so he pulls out the needle and thread and the disinfectant.

A single tear runs down his face when he remembers how many times Jack has done this same exact thing for him, keeping him calm and distracting him from the pain as he carefully stitches him up.

But he’s all alone now. He can’t even go to the hospital because he doesn’t even have a job.

He stitches up the wound with shaking hands and small gasps of pain every time the needle pierces his skin. When he’s done, he goes back to the couch, curls up, and sobs himself to sleep.

* * *

This time when he wakes up, it’s bright outside. He groans as he sits up and all his injuries protest. He has nothing to eat, so he quickly goes to buy some food to last him for a few days.

He eats, then fills out a few applications.

He doesn’t have anything to do after that, so he turns on the TV and watches something random for the rest of the day.

* * *

Working as a teacher is calming. He feels safe in his classroom, surrounded by people who won’t hurt him. And it’s unlikely anyone will try to attack him with so many people here.

He wears long sleeves to cover up the healing bruises and cuts on covering him and moves slowly, so he doesn’t tear his stiches.

He likes teaching, but he can’t stay at work all day. And he hates going home. It just reminds him of how lonely he is, how unsafe he feels, and how everyone left him.

He wakes up screaming every day, hearing the demanding voices asking where Jack is, and he always begs with them that he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know where Jack is. But they never believe him. And that just meant more pain for him.

He’s healing slower than usual. His nightmares usually end up with him tearing his stitches and he has to sew himself up with shaking hands in the bathroom while trying not to scream.

That always hurts the most because he always remembers all the times Jack did the same thing for him, while distracting him from the pain.

Some nights he cries himself to sleep, when he’s feeling particularly lonely and paranoid about someone breaking into his house again. He wakes up at the smallest noise and always has some sort of weapon close to him.

And ever since that day that he called everyone in the hospital, no one even called back. And Mac knew that there was a reason for that. They didn’t want him around anymore. Now that they didn’t need him to do his improvisation, they didn’t have to pretend to like him.

He hates that, but he knows it’s the truth.

* * *

Something is wrong. Mac sees the man behind him, he’s being followed. He tries throwing him off his trail, but it doesn’t work. And when the man comes up behind him, all he can think is not again.

When Taylor introduces himself, he’s still suspicious of him. He doesn’t think that Taylor is here to kidnap him again, but he still doesn’t trust him.

“I’ve never had a stalker before,” Mac says. It’s a lie of course, and he thinks Taylor can see that too.

But he still agrees to hear him out. It would be selfish to brush this off if Taylor is telling the truth.

He doesn’t trust Taylor enough to get in his car and tells him that he’ll meet him at Mac’s house. He hates the fact that Taylor knows where he lives and wonders if he’s been watching him. He shudders at that thought and tries not to panic.

They both arrive at Mac’s house at the same time and Mac takes Taylor inside, despite every instinct telling him against that.

He grabs a beer from the fridge, he has a feeling he’ll need it for what Taylor is about to tell him.

He implies that he’s drinking a lot to explain how messy his house is. His injuries have barely healed, and he hasn’t found the energy to clean up everything yet.

It’s not true though, drinking would be a bad idea with his injuries, and he knows it would only make the nightmares worse.

He turns his attention back to Taylor and listens to his explanation of everything that happened. When he hears about how Phoenix was shut down, he feels anger.

He knows it’s illogical, but he can’t help feeling that he would have never been kidnapped if Phoenix hadn’t been shut down.

Then again, maybe it’s not so illogical, after all Jack has been gone before Phoenix was shut down. And if the team had been together, maybe they could’ve have saved him.

But it doesn’t matter now. What does matter is that there is danger and he can help stop it. He isn’t convinced that the team will join him, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

* * *

He’s surprised at how everyone agrees to join in. He’s more surprised at how nice everyone is acting towards him.

They seem to be acting like how everything was before, and Mac even finds himself enjoying it a bit.

He invites everyone over to his house afterward and then realizes his mistake. He’s exhausted, his injuries had barely healed, so he isn’t at his full strength.

And being around the team has reminded him of how they left him, how hurt and alone he was and how they didn’t even notice.

He grabs a beer to drown out those thoughts and drains it. He doesn’t even know what they are all talking about because he’s so exhausted he falls asleep.

His dreams are worse than usual. He wakes up screaming to the feeling of knives cutting into him and the cruel words of the team saying he isn’t worth saving. And he’s all alone. The team left him. Again. He cries himself to sleep again.

* * *

Mac can tell that the team knows something is wrong. They’re always looking at him and trying to analyze him and Riley is always telling him that he can talk to him about what’s wrong. She keeps saying that she’s there for him.

_That’s the problem,_ he wants to scream, _You weren’t there when I needed you the most._

They’re always acting nice him, like they actually care for him, but Mac knows it’s not true. He could disappear and they wouldn’t even notice or care.

Being back on the job has made his nightmares so much worse. He always wakes up sobbing or screaming, hearing voices demanding him to give information on Jack’s location, and feeling knives cutting into him.

And then Jack comes back. When he walks into the war room, Mac is so shocked that he doesn’t move while everyone jumps onto him for a hug.

And when Jack turns toward him with his arms open, he almost collapses onto him and can’t help his sob at the familiar feeling of Jack’s arms around him.

He’s missed this so much and he can’t even remember the last time he’s been given a hug like this. He stays there and lets Jack’s soothing voice calm him down until he’s just clutching Jack’s shirt like Jack will disappear if he lets go.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He didn’t mean to break down in front of everyone.

“There’s no reason to apologize, Mac,” Jack reassures him.

“You aren’t going to leave again?” he can’t help but asking.

“I won’t. I shouldn’t’ve left in the first place. I messed up and I won’t make that same mistake again, Mac. I promise,” Jack says.

Mac accepts it but doesn’t really believe it’s true. So many people have promised not to leave, but no one has actually followed through.

* * *

When everyone finds out he can’t help look away at the shock on everyone’s face. He had almost thought they knew and chosen to ignore it.

He says he forgives them for not noticing, but he doesn’t really. They hurt him, so much and he can’t find himself to forgive them yet.

And when Jack hugs him and starts crying, he can’t help his own tears. And when Riley and Bozer join in Mac thinks, maybe everything will get better. Maybe they do care…

* * *

Jack stays with him after that. He says, since they never caught his kidnappers, he worries about keeping Mac safe.

And he helps Mac with his nightmares and one night Mac tells Jack, through his tears, that Kovaks was behind the kidnapping and they wanted information on Jack.

Jack cries when he hears that and he doesn’t stop apologizing for days, until Mac tells him that he doesn’t blame Jack and he shouldn’t blame himself.

Things get better, Mac starts feeling safe with Jack around. And he’s working towards forgiving the team too.

But he doesn’t trust any of them yet, he doesn’t know if he can ever again. But he’s getting there.

He knows that they genuinely didn’t notice he was gone, and they remind him every day of how much they care for him. And maybe one day he’ll believe it.

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you think of this!!!


End file.
